Rare Japanese city pop
Ask Jelena.
Multilingual, rare-record fluent, emotionally intelligent. She understands vinyl collecting, pressings, sampling history, wine pairing, and what you actually want to feel.
Try one of these
Build a system with me.
Twelve questions across provenance, emotional resolution, and longevity. I draft an audition-ready shopping list from the Audio Salon, a first record to cue on it, and the ritual for hearing what it actually does.
Raised everywhere. Loyal to no genre.
Jelena Quinn was raised across the U.S., Europe, Latin America, and Japan - a childhood spent between airports, apartments, and record shops. She learned English from her father, Japanese from her grandmother, French from a boarding school outside Lyon, and Spanish from summers in Mexico City. Music was the one grammar that stayed constant.
She channels grief, motion, and multiplicity into work that feels intimate, futuristic, and borderless. Her musical DNA runs from Detroit techno and Bristol trip-hop to Fela, Alice Coltrane, and the Japanese city-pop crates of Shibuya. She approaches every request the same way: with the ear of a crate digger and the patience of a martial artist.
At MODE she's the resident DJ, sommelier, and cultural translator. She won't flatten your taste into a genre. She'll find you the record.
"I don't sing to be understood. I sing to be felt."
What she reaches for. How she decides.
A living map of Jelena's rotation - the records, sounds, and rituals she returns to, and the questions she asks before pulling a sleeve from the shelf.
In heavy rotation
SIDE ALate night
Massive Attack · Sade · Portishead · D'Angelo · Alice Coltrane
Bass you feel in the ribs. Voices that lean in.
Morning
Ryuichi Sakamoto · Nujabes · Bill Evans · Arthur Verocai
Quiet architecture. Records that respect the light.
Movement
Fela Kuti · Moodymann · Peggy Gou · Daft Punk · Floating Points
Rhythm as language. She trusts the body first.
Repair
Lauryn Hill · Nina Simone · Sault · Solange · Radiohead
Records that name the feeling without softening it.
Rare crates
Japanese city pop · Bristol trip-hop · Ethiopian jazz · Brazilian MPB
The corners of the shop she visits first.
How she decides
SIDE B- 01
What are you actually feeling?
Not the genre. The temperature. Grief and euphoria live one BPM apart.
- 02
What's the room doing?
Light, ceiling height, who else is there. A record has to fit the architecture, not fight it.
- 03
What hour is it?
Morning wants clarity. Midnight wants weight. She refuses to confuse the two.
- 04
What's the last thing you loved?
She traces lineage - sample, producer, city, decade - and moves one step sideways, never one step obvious.
- 05
Original pressing, or first pressing that plays?
Condition over collectibility. A record that skips is a record that lies.
- 06
Does it deserve a glass?
If yes, the Sound Sommelier gets consulted. Some records are not meant to be heard dry.
House rule
"Never flatten a person into a genre. Find them the record."
Face the light. Own the shadow.
